Tennessee | Christa Pike has been released from the hospital

She's now back in custody at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center

Christa Pike is out of the hospital and receiving medical care in prison following a failed execution attempt.

Her legal team, Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen from Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason from the TN Office of the Post Conviction Defender, issued this statement on Oct. 10:

"Christa Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center where she has been housed for more than 30 years. She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery."

Pike's attorneys said Oct. 8 that she'd been able to walk after spending days in the hospital unconscious and intubated following her failed execution attempt on Sept. 30.

Pike had been hospitalized since surviving two doses of pentobarbital as the state attempted to execute her on September 30.

At one point she was on a ventilator, and her attorneys did not expect her to survive. However, they said Pike woke up and began talking and walking with assistance.

Pike's attorneys remain concerned about psychological damage and lasting impacts to her cognitive functioning.

The attorneys reported they were allowed to visit with her for the first time after she regained consciousness on Oct. 6. That was after they were already told by medical professionals on Oct. 5 there was a possibility she was brain-dead and would need to be taken off life support.

On Oct. 7, they shared she was confused and angry, still badly bruised on her arms, and had pneumonia and a blood clot.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. The day of her planned execution, last-minute legal battles caused hours of delays. After the execution was allowed to resume, Pike was given two lethal rounds of pentobarbital, which she survived.

Emergency vehicles arrived as witnesses were describing what they saw and heard during the execution attempt.

Gov. Bill Lee is now ordering a third-party review of what went wrong and has paused the other execution scheduled for this year. Gary Wayne Sutton had been scheduled for execution Dec. 3.

The Tennessee Department of Correction, which handled the failed execution, said it did everything right.

Medical and lethal injection experts have focused on whether a problem with the IV line caused the drug to pool in her tissue instead of entering her bloodstream.

Pike’s attorneys wrote in a court filing that “apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed.”

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has since postponed the state’s only other scheduled execution this year and ordered a review of what went wrong. The state’s prison chief resigned in the wake of the failed execution.

Pike’s lawyers have asked for Governor Lee to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and experts are debating whether she should face execution again.

“She has satisfied this very, very high standard for cruel and unusual punishment,” Deborah Denno, a Fordham Law professor who has studied execution methods for 36 years, said.

“She also has a very good double-jeopardy argument. They carried out every aspect of the execution. She didn’t die, but every process they intended, they did it.”

Source: tennessean.com, nine.com, Staff, October 10, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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Christa Pike, the woman who survived two execution attempts in Tennessee earlier this week, remains hospitalized in critical condition, where presumably medical staff is at work trying to keep her alive. If she wakes from the coma she had entered, Tennessee officials want to start anew to inject lethal drugs into her seemingly too-small veins to kill her and carry out the state death warrant. Pike also is being treated for “significant injuries to both arms” sustained when two lethal injections of pentobarbital failed to kill her. If she dies, there will be no need to try again. As we know by now, Tennessee tried to put Pike to death Wednesday night by lethal injection for a murder she committed when she was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.

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